Time for an update from the Blender Game Engine team! and guess what.. we’ve got something you can play!

Being this the first Blender Game Engine demo we publish, it will only focus on the technical side, so don’t expect big gameplay experience, in this demo we provide a small level with a few platforms and some characters running around, so you can test if the blenderplayer runs on your computer and we can have nice feedback from that.

Please check the yo_readme!.txt file, it will guide you through the controller keys, and how to setup Blender for running without some gfx features for older computers. (even a spanish version! : )

You can get Yo Frankie! Demo #1 right below, basically there is a version with and without GLSL, while GLSL gives you nice shaders, real time shadows and other features.. it can be very expensive, so if the game runs any slow in your computer, you should check the version without GLSL).

Remember you can always use the source files with a recent Blender build!

Update #1

Updated the Linux version to use static python (so it doesn’t depends on the one installed in the computer), also doesn’t use gettext, exr, and some others.
Tagged it as 1.1 so you can keep track of which version you’re playing.

At the right is an image you can see how the game should look with and without GLSL.

Note: If the binaries doesn’t run, you can always open the ‘.gamedata.blend’ in a very recent Blender build (trunk, not the apricot branch, built today or yesterday) and run it (the readme file is also embedded in the Text editor, so you can read it in Blender).

We want to make sure you all can play the game before we give more features away, once this demo is successful and we know it plays well in most computers, we plan to release a new demo with more gameplay and features.

We hope you enjoy it!, leave any technical problem right below, gameplay suggestions are also welcome but this time we are focusing mostly on having YoFrankie! running

The Linux packages have been updated since the last post. Currently the latest version is available through automatic downloading: go to one of the URLs listed below and follow the instructions on screen. This will download all required packages etc. onto your system and has the added advantage that the program can be kept up-to-date automatically as well – i.e. when a change is made, either to the game or CrystalSpace, the changed component is downloaded automatically (and only that) and used. (Note x86_64 users: you need a very recent version of 0install, 0.35 or newer, to run the package. That means you may have to install that manually on some distros.)

You can now test the Linux (well, for Intel machines) packages for the “CrystalSpace Edition” of YoFrankie. There are basically two ways to obtain it:

Automatic downloading: go to http://crystalspace3d.org/downloads/YoFrankie/YoFrankie.xml and follow the instructions on screen. This will download all required packages etc. onto your system and has the added advantage that the program can be kept up-to-date automatically as well – i.e. when a change is made, either to the game or CrystalSpace, the changed component is downloaded automatically (and only that) and used. (Note x86_64 users: you need a very recent version of 0install, 0.35 or newer, to run the package. That means you may have to install that manually on some distros.)

Here is short movie showing current progress of the game. You can see fishes for example, how they know where to swim ? It’s possible to make environment collision sensor but common solution in the gamedev world in this situation is navigation graph. Games are always cheating, don’t trust them Game needs to convince player that something looks natural but hidden method is always something easy to use/easy to compute. Fishes also trying to not to swim too close to each other, but not to far ! Sheep also using same herd algorithm included in the Crystal Entity Layer.

Crystal Space has been nominated for the SourceForge Community Awards 2008. There are multiple categories and Crystal Space has been nominated in the ‘Best Project for Gamers’ category. If you like Crystal Space then I would like to invite you to take a little of your time to vote for us. If we win it would be a huge publicity boost and I think that would be in the benefit of anyone who would like to use Crystal Space for games. However, if you DON’T like Crystal Space then you can still vote for us. I’m not going to stop you